1st and 2nd WW memorial at the castle.

Photos from Bielefeld

View of the Sparrenburg, the castle overlooking the city.

The castle was probably built in early 1200s. This is looking up at one of the corner towers.

View from hilltop castle area 

Plan of the 17th century castle and curtain walls. Only one tower was left standing after an Allied bombing raid, September 30, 1944. What is there has been reconstructed.

Photos from a couple of old churches in the old part of the city, both of them Catholic. 

Incredible carved pulpit. These are two of the evangelists

The pulpit from a distance. Those of you who know our son will recognize the look he sometimes uses in posing for pictures!

 

Part of the 16th century Cloister Church

Beautiful modern mosaic in church

Old fresco of Saint Francis

Black Madonna brought from old church to the cloister church

Beautiful old carved St. Joseph with Christ child

Another gorgeous mosaic, this one of the Pieta

Some of the Old Town that survived the bombing

Half-timbered old buildings in the Old Town

Spaghetti Ice-cream and a Spa

 How spaghetti ice-cream looks after one has taken two bites of it.

 Today I did something kinda brave--at least for a non-urban American: I took a train to one of the many spa towns near here, all of them built around thermal mineral springs. The one that was recommended to me, and also the closest as the crow flies, required a train and then a bus and then another bus. I wasn't THAT brave! Plus, even though it was closest to Bielefeld, it would have taken over an hour to make the trip, with waiting to make the transfers. This was just too complicated. Perhaps if I still lived in a city and relied on mass transit to get around, I would have thought this sounded reasonable. But I have not lived in a city for over 30 years!!

Anyway, I looked at the map, walked over to the train station, and asked at the information desk if the spa at Bad Oeynhausen was anywhere near the train station, as I could see a train listed for Bad Oeynhausen, and I knew that meant it likely had a thermal spring spa. The answer was 'yes' (and the fact that it has a spa confirmed), and so I bought a round-trip ticket, took the 20-minute train ride, and then walked in the most lovely town,

The main street of Bad Oeynhausen

Beautiful old houses along the cure-park

The main pedestrian shopping and cafe street

through the most lovely park,

One of the rehabilitation clinics

One of the many, many fountains throughout the park 

 in absolutely lovely weather, to the spa. The park is called a "curepark", being the setting for a large campus of various rehabilitation clinics, many of them gorgeous (google on images of bad oeynhausen, for photos that do the town and the park better justice than my little phone could). The town is filled with people undergoing various kinds of rehab, and with their family members.  It looks very much like a very lovely tourist town, but a young woman who lives there said that it mostly serves the patients and their families.

A huge geyser-like fountain; it goes up to 40 meters high

And yet another fountain 

I went to the spa, Bali Therme, located in this park also, and went in every pool of water I could find!! The water was warm, not hot, and filled with the kinds of carbonated mineral salts that make you float. There was a fun area with a strong current where you could kind of ride on the water. There were various whirlpools and places you could lie on the bubbling jets. there were simple swimming or water-exercising areas. There was a group of moms introducing their babies to the water, and oh, how wonderful it was to wave hello to many of those babies and get toothless smiles back.

The best water therapy "pool" was actually 2 long, narrow, shallow pools right next to each other, one warm and the other cold, each with a bottom that felt like walking on the beach, with sand and smooth rocks. What one did was walk the length of one, and then go into the other and walk the length of it. The depth was about up to my knees, and the first time around, going into the cold water was a bit of a shock. But after that, it was wonderful!!!: relaxing and energizing at the same time, and it had the interesting effect of absorbing my brain, so it was somewhat meditative, as well. I know that going back and forth from warm to cold water is good for the nervous system in general; I suspect it also tones the immune system (I couldn't read the German explanations!). Oh, a local friend just told me it is supposed to be good for the circulatory system. I am trying to figure out how I could reproduce this at home (not just in the shower, but walking).

Okay, okay, I'm getting to the explanation of the "spaghetti ice-cream." Everywhere we go (and I remember this from Poland, too, when I was there in the summer) there are as many ice-cream cafes as there are "regular" cafes in Paris. People seem to live on ice-cream and coffee drinks here. The ice-cream cafes always have lots of people of all ages at them, eating ice-cream, and one sees lots of people of all ages eating ice-cream cones while walking, also.
These ice-cream cafes offer all kinds of beautiful ice-cream works of art. I have NEVER seen such dishes offered anywhere in the U.S. I have been. These are not the same thing as ice-cream sundaes; they are beautifully and artfully designed and made; maybe I should say they are works of architecture, too.
One of the common kinds of ice-cream dishes is what is called "spaghetti ice-cream."  I am not much of an ice-cream eater; a couple of times each year, I have a small dish of some special kind of ice-cream, not a sundae. But I saw a woman eating one of these dishes of ice-cream at a lovely cafe in Bad Oeynhausen, and I asked the waitress what it was. "Spaghetti," she answered, to my confusion, until she opened the menu and pointed, and then I understood.
Basically, what they do is put the ice-cream on the dish through something like a play-doh factory, and the ice-cream comes out like spaghetti!!! It sits in a pretty pile on the plate, and on it are added such things as whipped cream (under the ice-cream, for height and deliciousness), fresh strawberry sauce (as the tomato sauce), cookies (as the meatballs, and for decoration), and some sort of shredded stuff, for parmesan cheese. They also do this to various flavors of ice-cream, so one does not have to have white/vanilla spaghetti ice-cream.
So I ordered this dish, and when it arrived, I realized it was large enough for 3 people to eat and for all of them to feel quite full. I told myself that I would of course only eat about a fifth of it, but I did end up eating half (my stomach did not like this too much, later). The whipped cream and the strawberry sauce were just too yummy for me to stop eating! I left the "meatball" cookie, but did eat the oblaten/waffle cookie, because, come one, who doesn't love those?

So it was an absolutely lovely day in Bad Oeynhausen (oh, for lunch at a cafe, I had spargel (asparagus) bruschetta, with what must have been small bits of ham, and hollandaise sauce. This asparagus thing is great, and it turns out to be really, really good for us! Hooray!!

And I didn't even look up the town to see if it had any bad history!! How's that? Oh, but it IS on the Fairy Tale Road, which unites a large number of towns, cities and villages that are related to the Grimm Brothers. It turns out that Bad Oeynhausen has a fairy tale museum!

Goslar and Bad Harshafen
Please remember that I am posting these a week after experiencing and writing them! I can only post when in my hotel and having access to wifi, and right now I am missing a lovely sunny day to post these now!! I also have to transfer the photos from my tablet to my laptop, organize them so I know which ones are to go in which blog post (and which ones I won't use). So it's quite a process. It was easier 4 years ago when we were in Ireland, for example, as I just used any rainy time to work on it!! The weather here is sunnier!
Okay, here goes, with the last bits of what we did before arriving in Bielefeld last week.

On Monday (May 26th) we waved a fond farewell to Quedlinburg and our beautiful guesthouse, drove north passed the Brocken once again, and rounded the northern flanks of the Harz to the walled town of Goslar, 

Part of the fortifications of Goslar

Approaching another town gate

the very first town inside West Germany during the Cold War. Goslar, still part of the Harz region, also has many half-timbered buildings, 

and a large emperor’s palace,

Emperor Heinrich's Palace

an 11th century chapel, which contains the heart of Emperor Heinrich (Henry) III (because he apparently loved the town so much). Goslar got very wealthy in the Middle Ages due to the very rich silver and copper mines in the area, and the town square has numerous mansions.

The chapel with the Emperor Heinrich's heart

Pig on fountain in market square

Fountain in market square, with wealthy mine-owner's or merchant's mansion in background

Another mansion, with restaurant below being where we had wonderful waffle with fresh strawberries and whipped cream!

We walked around the oldest part of the town (noting the site of the old Jewish neighborhood--there was one in Quedlinburg, too), stopped into a church with fascinating and non-Christian medieval decorations,

Multi-gender (beards and breasts) mer-people carved onto the pulpit

There were numerous "green men" carved into the pulpit also. The larger image to your right is a lovely carving of the visit of Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, the Visitation.

Large quartz crystal set into a polished tree trunk with a pewter seashell attached. This was in front in the church. 

ate lunch in the markt-platz, and got back on the road for our next overnight destination: Bad Karlshafen (Bad=thermal baths, so the word indicates a spa. Though I cannot tell you how many times we have giggled/chuckled over the spa town names. One is actually Bad Sascha. How many times can YOU say it as a reprimand, as if Sascha were your dog, before the joke gets old? Apparently Don and I can drag out a joke like this for a long time).  

We chose Bad Karshafen from the Lonely Planet Guidebook as a spa town that was smaller than the one just north-east of it, in the old GDR, Bad Harzburg. Our only real reason was that there were simply too many places to choose from to stay in the larger town, and not enough of them had good ratings from Trip Advisor, and we didn’t want to spend the kind of money they were asking for the nice places. So sue us. This is how we make decisions. Pretty much our whole adult lives.

The cool thing about this part of the trip was NOT Bad Karshafen, which turned out to be a pretty enough little town, on the very lovely Wesser River; what was the wonderful part was the drive there. Not only did we end up on small country roads (thank God for the GPS provided in the rental car!!) that wound up and down and around and aound, but we wound up at a Wesser River crossing that turned out to be a one-car ferry, operated by one man and an overhead cable (which is a very good thing, because without the cable, the current was strong enough that the ferry would have ended up far downstream every time it left shore). The setting was entirely rural and quiet, and the only technology in sight that that had been created in the last, oh, 100 years, was the fancy engineering in the new-model VW car we were driving. It cost all of 3.50 euros (about $4.75) and was worth every penny, being one of the highlights of our trip so far. I know, we’re easily amused and delighted, but we seriously felt just like the hobbits when they were leaving the Shire, except, of course, we weren’t being chased by Nazgul  (and thank all the gods in heaven for that). Here are a series of pictures of us approaching the river crossing, from the moment we realized that we had just driven, not to a bridge, but to the river itself, to where we are in the middle of the river.

The river crossing on the GPS

The ferry beginning to come closer

And from the middle of the peaceful river.

The Wesser River from the middle of the ferry while crossing it.

When we got to Bad Harshafen, we decided to sit beside the Wesser for—and after—supper

This riverboat seemed to be offer a dinner cruise and was loading a band.

It's easy to see how easily this can flood the town.

From the middle of the Wesser River bridge

instead of going swimming and lounging in the naturally warm, heavily—naturally—salted spa pools, thinking that perhaps we—or at least I—would visit the pools this morning. Alas, it was pouring rain this morning, and the experience lost its appeal. So we instead set out for Bielefeld this morning after breakfast, which included the standard German hotel buffet of yogurts, fruit, multiple kinds of sausage and other kind of disgusting meat products, cereals, wonderful breads –the northern Europeans REALLY know how to make breads, hearty, brown, healthy and wonderful-tasting breads—and, wonder of wonders, smoked salmon on both tomato slices and on hard-boiled eggs. After tasting this latter culinary delight, I wondered, “Why has it not occurred to anyone I know to place slices of smoked salmon on hard-boiled eggs (with apologies to those to whom it HAS occurred)?” This is a dish I am going to replicate at home as soon as I am home.

Oh, I can’t forget, especially because yesterday was our Memorial Day: there are markings in Bad Karshafen that indicate the height of the Wesser River during various floods, going back to the mid-1700s. Some of those heights were incredible, as they clearly would have covered at least the ground floors of every building we were seeing, and would have drowned many people if the floods came suddenly and without warning. One of those very destructive floods took place in 1943, when British bombers destroyed the large dam upstream.  Here’s a link if you want to read about that bombing mission: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chastise

There is a discussion in that article on the bunker-busting bombs that were used by the allies in the next town on our itinerary: Bielefeld, to its almost complete annihilation. These bombs were developed because they did not require accuracy to wreak destruction; they caused local earthquake-like results, and thus bombers could drop bombs NEAR a bridge or viaduct, and it would shake apart that target.

Because we skipped the spa pools, we arrived in Bielefeld too early to actually get into our room, of course. The very nice reception people loaned us umbrellas and we walked on the pedestrian mall until the magnificent aromas wafting from a café/restaurant drove us—me—inside for lunch. This was a lovely old-fashioned tea-room, with quiches, sandwiches, soups, and crepes. The amazing smell turned out to be from the fresh Belgian waffles being cooked on the griddle downstairs; I shall have to avail myself of one of these soon. We had one yesterday in Goslar with fresh strawberries and cream, and it was quite spectacular (note: days later, I tried one of these heavenly-smelling waffles, and alas,  it was nowhere near the amazing experience it had been in Goslar, nor did it live anywhere up to its aroma. Sigh).

Bielefeld was almost completely destroyed by Allied bombing in the last year of the war.  It was an industrial area, but more importantly, there was a railway viaduct that was a major target, as its destruction would stop delivery of war goods in many directions. Here are links to photos and video of the bombing here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeUQKl81aN4

 http://www.baor-locations.org/bielefeldvarious.aspx.html

See, I can’t get away from certain topics, even when I try.

There are still some old buildings here, and Don tells me that some old churches remain.  There is also a British cemetery, as the British had a base here after the war. Good hiking, I hear, on the ridges nearby. But for now, it is raining for a couple of days, and there is a large pile of laundry that needs doing. So reading, writing, and clothes-washing at the laundromat will take up my next couple of days. Sounds like just what I need after running around for the past week. I will rejoin you once I get organized to post about Bielefeld.

The Brocken

Written on Monday and Tuesday, May 26-27, 2014

It is Asparagus (Spargel) and Strawberry Season here in Germany, and every single restaurant and café has a special menu of their Spargel Gala: meals based around asparagus, and desserts using fresh strawberries. We are, like the Germans, eating asparagus at at least one meal each day, sometimes, as happened today, at both lunch and supper. The entire country must have asparagus pee. You know what I mean.

The last few days have been wonderful!!  IN our rental car we have been driving between Berlin and Bielefeld. Germany is a very large country; can someone please explain to me why on earth they thought they needed all of Europe to spread out in? I’m just sayin’…

We have been in a couple of places now that we are told rarely see Americans or even Brits, for that matter. They are primarily tourist destinations for Germans. As I posted, the first was the beautiful, adorable town of Quedlinburg, just south of the Harz Mountains and just inside the old East Germany (FYI, the towns nearest the border were the most policed, the most restricted). Uh-oh, now I’m going to go immediately to the whole Iron Curtain thing. Again, I can’t help it; being in what was East Germany for a week gets to me.

Go to this website for a detailed and horrifying description of what the enforced border was like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_German_border

By the way, it is incredible to me that the GDR government justified—to its people and to the border guards—the erection of The Wall and the rest of the horrific border system as being to protect East German from NATO military aggression.  With no physical evidence that anyone was trying to get IN with tanks or jeeps, the East German people could see that their own compatriots were being killed in the “death zones,” and that the soldiers had “shoot to kill” orders for anyone caught in those death zones. You’d have to be an idiot to believe it was to keep anyone out.  The GDR government itself knew its primary reason; before the erection of The Wall in 1961, over a million East Germans had fled the GDR.

Okay, back to the more light-hearted tourist stuff: 

Sunday we drove north to the Brocken, the highest mountain in Northern Germany, at 1141 meters. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark certainly don’t have anything this high, so it is the highest point all the way north to the Baltic. Because of that fact, at about 3700 feet, it is similar to the White Mountains in New Hampshire in that it “behaves” more like mountains elsewhere that are twice as high. The top of it is above the tree line, because the winds and storms are so fierce, and it gets so cold for so long (normal snow cover is from mid-autumn until May), that the plants that live there-lichens and mosses- are Alpine.

We joined much, it seemed, of the German population on this sunny Sunday in reaching the summit one way or another: by horse-drawn carriage, on foot, or, as we did, by narrow-gauge coal-fired steam-powered train. 

Looking down toward the narrow-gauge coal-fired train that chugs up the mountain. I understand the historical fun of continuing to use coal to power the cute engine, but geez.... look at that dark and smelly smoke in this gorgeous place.

The Brocken and the entire Harz Mountains region are very popular hiking areas, for many reasons. They are quite beautiful, and are a national park, with waterfalls, deciduous and coniferous forests, and deep valleys. They are also the setting for myths dear to the German heart, and the setting for Goethe’s Dr. Faust selling his soul to the devil (no, I’m not going to start talking about the Nazis again, I promise). The Harz Mountains and particularly the Brocken are part of ancient stories of witches, trolls, and dwarves, and the focus of annual May Eve (Walpurgis’ night) witches’ celebrations. 

Sign discussing the "Hexenaltar", the "Witches' Altar"

Me in front of the "witches' altar"

The Brocken was probably a sacred mountain to both the Celtic people and to the Germanic tribal groups that replaced them. When it was just inside East Germany (the GDR), it became completely closed to anyone except the military and Stasi; on top of it remains the listening station that was built there, used to listen in on Western Europe and West Germany.  

The television tower and the Soviet listening station on top of the Brocken.

Soldiers patrolled the mountain and nearby peaks, and they were mined and fenced. When the Communist era ended, the Brocken was visited by thousands of German visitors in just the first few days, celebrating its return to the German people. At the top of the mountain is a stone with a plaque that proclaims it, like the East German people, “free again.” The Brocken became a symbol of reunification.

Looking down the mountain to, I think, the north.

Looking up the mountain towards the listening station. Note the concrete paths for hiking.